City to City at ISEA 2022

City to City was presented to participants from around the world at an international Media Art meeting in June.

The 27th International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA) took place in Barcelona on 10-16 June this year. The return to a full-scale in person event, the first since ISEA last met in Gwangju, Korea in 2019, was applauded by the hundreds of delegates who gathered to discuss possible futures at the intersection of art, media and technology. The ISEA organisers selected our proposal, to present the City to City project of the Media Arts Cities, at a panel of Institutional Presentations on the theme of Heritages, Community and Citizenship. A condensed version of the paper, prepared by Chris Bailey, is published in the Proceedings.

The panel offered a valuable comparative context, alongside presentations of Beyond Matter, an international project led by ZKM, Karlsruhe, an evaluation of the hybrid ISEA conference which was hosted by Montreal in 2020, and the digital education initiative Kulturtanken (or ‘Cultural Schoolbag’) in Norway. As with these other initiatives, the constraints imposed by the pandemic helped shape the City to City project, and made it something it might not otherwise have become. The deep collaborations that have developed are a good basis on which to build the next City to City, in 2023.

In 2022 this prestigious meeting, on the theme of Symbiosis, will take place in Paris, under the leadership of Le Cube and the Ecole des Arts Decoratifs. Proposals for contributions, both creative and theoretical, are invited. In the past ISEA has taken place in Gwangju and in other UNESCO Creative Cities. As a world-leading conference for the sector, Media Arts Cities are the ideal host for a future ISEA .